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Florida’s school districts are anticipating a difficult budget year. The “base student allocation” – the amount of per-student funding that can most flexibly be used to pay for a variety of expenses including teacher salaries – is only 47 cents larger for the school year that begins this August than it was during the school year that just ended.

Republican legislators increased the amount of money heading for schools by a much larger amount than that, but targeted that additional money to issues like school security and mental health services.

So it’s worth taking a look at where state education money is presently going, to see if there are any items in the state’s education budget that should be redirected into base funding during the next legislative session.

There is one program that both Democrats and Republicans should be able to agree on terminating: a bonus program for teachers that controversially relies on the ACT or SAT score earned by a teacher, often decades before when the teacher was applying to college. To qualify for the bonus, which was worth $7,200 for most recipients this year, teachers are required to have an ACT or SAT score in the 80th percentile or higher and to be evaluated as “highly effective.”

This ACT/SAT-driven bonus program is part of the state’s Best and Brightest Teacher Scholarship Program, which now includes smaller bonuses for all teachers who earn ratings of “highly effective” and “effective” regardless of ACT/SAT scores.

Paying teachers based on college placement exams that they may have taken decades before doesn’t make any sense. But in the 2017-18 school year, about $70 million was spent on this bonus program.

The rationale for the ACT/SAT-based bonus program was that it would attract more talented individuals into the teaching profession. It didn’t work – at least for some of the math and science subjects in which teacher shortages are most acute.

The number of individuals taking the exam for high school math certification (called “Math 6-12”) for the first time has dropped 16 percent since the ACT/SAT-based bonus program was first authorized in 2015. The number of first-time Math 6-12 exam takers had already been dropping even before the bonus program was authorized. Since 2013, the cumulative decline is 33 percent.

The numbers of individuals taking the certification exams in Biology, Chemistry and Earth/Space Science for the first time have declined substantially as well.

It should not be a heavy lift for lawmakers to terminate the ACT/SAT-based bonus program. There should be bipartisan agreement that an expensive program that doesn’t work shouldn’t be allowed to continue.

If the $70 million spent on the ACT/SAT-based bonus program was folded back into the base student allocation, it would result in a per-pupil increase of more than $20.

That’s not enough to meet the needs the district superintendents can document, but it’s a heck of a lot more than the 47 cent per pupil increase the districts are receiving for the coming school year.

Paul Cottle is a professor of physics at Florida State University and past chair of the Forum on Education of the American Physical Society.